Nothing More To Talk About

Many religious family members pray for their atheist and agnostic loved ones graciously, honoring personal boundaries and showing respect for the skeptic's right to form his/her own worldview. This video is not about them. This video is an open letter to the mothers, fathers, siblings and friends who attempt to rescue the atheist by sheer, constant, suffocating volume. If you're a skeptic fending off the constant barrage of attempts to convince, cajole and convert you to Christianity, perhaps this video will help you articulate your reasons for rejecting superstition and choosing the path of reason, science and common sense.

Dear ______I know that you believe in God and I do not. You fear that Hell awaits the non-believer. But I will not. You accept the Bible as true, but I cannot. Throughout recent months and years you have stood on my doorstep, made countless phone calls at all hours of the day and night, sent me long letters, given me books and sermons, invited me to church and prayed nonstop for my salvation. And after all the pleasding, the raised voices, the confusion, anger and tears, after all we have been through I know how frustrating it must be that I still do not see things your way. Please know that I am equally frustrated. Because you demand boundaries of respect for your own worldview while continuing to intrude and interfere uninvited into mine. This brings us to a critical moment where I must say some difficult things and draw a very clear line in the sand.If you continue to misrepresent the theory of evolution by representing the word theory in an intellectually dishonest way*, we have nothing more to talk about. If you dismiss the evidence of evolution by natural selection observable in our world and in our own DNA and you instead believe our true origins involve a lonely, floating being in outer space and a naked man and woman in a sacred garden and an enchanted tree and a talking snake, we have nothing more to talk about. If you believe that it makes sense that God would send a moral, trustworthy, honest, loving, hard-working, non-believer to eternal torture in Hell yet would allow a serial killer to enter Heaven after a deathbed conversion, we have nothing more to talk about. If you believe that human beings could live to be almost a thousand years old in the Bronze Age (Genesis 5:27), we have nothing more to talk about. If you believe that a Church, God's house, should ever need to buy an insurance policy against disaster, we have nothing more to talk about. If you would pay a two thousand dollar insurance deductable toward an invasive surgical procedure performed by trained doctors, recover over a period of weeks with prescription medications invented by scientists and then thank God for his devine healing, we have nothing more to talk about. If you believe it is moral and rightous to thrust the tip of a sword into the beating heart of a baby (Joshua 6:21), if you think it is reasonable that an all-powerful, loving God (1 John 4:8) would not prevent 300,00 men, women, teenagers and infants from drowning in a tsunami because he works in mysterious ways. If you believe that any loving god would allow a child to die of cancer in the arms of his grieving parents, we have nothing more to talk about. If you believe in giants (Genesis 6:4), supermen (Judges 16: 29-30), unicorns (Isaiah 34:7), flying chariots of fire (2 Kings 2:11), the undead (John 11:44), leviathans (Job 41:1), healing mud (John 9:6), talking animals (Numbers 22:27), and the bibliocal account of a man who spent three days underwater living in the belly of a giant fish (Jonah 1:17), we have nothing more to talk about. Finally, at the end of the day, know that I do love you but after all these unbelievable stories have been brought to light, if you still believe that the burden of proof is on me, that my position is the unreasonable one, the fantastic one, the laughable one, and if you cannot and will not treat my private life, my choices, my personal boundaries, my world view with the respect I have so often asked for, we have nothing more to talk about.

*Theory: a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed. - Oxford English Dictionary